Mimi Lok is a British-Chinese author, editor, and educator. She is the recipient of a Smithsonian Ingenuity Award, A PEN America Award, and a California Book Award for Fiction. She is also the founder of

Voice of Witness Voice of Witness is a non-profit organization that uses oral history to illuminate contemporary human rights crises in the U.S. and around the world through an oral history book series (published by McSweeney's) and an education program. Voice of ...

, an award-winning human rights and oral history nonprofit organization focused on amplifying marginalized voices through a book series and a national education program. Her debut short story collection, '' Last of Her Name'' (

Kaya Press Kaya Press is an independent non-profit publisher of writers of the Asian and Pacific Islander diaspora. Founded in 1994 by the postmodern Korean writer Soo Kyung Kim, Kaya Press is currently housed in the Department of American Studies and Ethnic ...

, 2019) is the winner of the 2020 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, and a California Book Award silver medal for first fiction, and was a finalist for The California Independent Bookseller Alliance ‘Golden Poppy’ Book Awards 2020, and

CLMP The Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) is an American organization of independent literary publishers and magazines. It was founded in 1967 by Robie Macauley, Reed Whittemore (''The Carleton Miscellany,'' ''The New Republic''); Jule ...

Firecracker Award. The novella from the collection, "The Woman in the Closet" was a finalist for the 2020

National Magazine Award The National Magazine Awards, also known as the Ellie Awards, honor print and digital publications that consistently demonstrate superior execution of editorial objectives, innovative techniques, noteworthy enterprise and imaginative design. Or ...

, Some of the key themes that the author contemplates are human connection, the Asian diaspora, and empathy. Her work has been published in

McSweeney's McSweeney's Publishing is an American non-profit publishing house founded by Dave Eggers in 1998 and headquartered in San Francisco. Initially publishing the literary journal'' Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern'', the company has moved to n ...

Electric Literature ''Electric Literature'' is an independent publisher founded by Andy Hunter and Scott Lindenbaum in 2009 as a quarterly journal. It launched the first fiction magazine on the iPhone and iPad. The print version of the journal is produced via print ...

, Nimrod, Lucky Peach, Hyphen, and the

South China Morning Post The ''South China Morning Post'' (''SCMP''), with its Sunday edition, the ''Sunday Morning Post'', is a Hong Kong-based English-language newspaper owned by Alibaba Group. Founded in 1903 by Tse Tsan-tai and Alfred Cunningham, it has remained ...

Biography

Mimi Lok grew up in

Essex Essex () is a county in the East of England. One of the home counties, it borders Suffolk and Cambridgeshire to the north, the North Sea to the east, Hertfordshire to the west, Kent across the estuary of the River Thames to the south, and G ...

, in a small town outside of London. Her parents were immigrants from Hong Kong. Lok's father worked in restaurants and in a glass recycling factory, and her mother worked as a farmer, construction worker, and later for high street fashion companies as a garment worker. She got involved in journalism after a post-university visit to Hong Kong when the sovereignty of Hong Kong transferred from the United Kingdom to China. Lok studied visual arts before enrolling in a MFA in creative writing at

San Francisco State University San Francisco State University (commonly referred to as San Francisco State, SF State and SFSU) is a public research university in San Francisco. As part of the 23-campus California State University system, the university offers 118 different b ...

. After graduate school, in 2007, she volunteered as a researcher and interviewer with

, a book series started by

Dave Eggers Dave Eggers (born March 12, 1970) is an American writer, editor, and publisher. He wrote the 2000 best-selling memoir ''A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius''. Eggers is also the founder of ''Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern'', a lite ...

and

Lola vollen Laurie Lola Vollen is a scholar and human rights activist. She specializes in the repercussions of large-scale human rights abuses. Background Vollen graduated from Princeton in 1978 as a psychology major.

, and collected oral histories for an anthology ''"Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives"''. In 2009, Lok transitioned the series to a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, becoming its founding executive director and launching an education program. She lives in

the San Francisco Bay Area The San Francisco Bay Area, often referred to as simply the Bay Area, is a populous region surrounding the San Francisco, San Pablo, and Suisun Bay estuaries in Northern California. The Bay Area is defined by the Association of Bay Area Gover ...

, California.

References

British expatriates in the United States English people of Chinese descent Living people 21st-century British short story writers 21st-century English women writers British women short story writers Year of birth missing (living people) {{UK-writer-stub